Molokaʻi

“ In seasons of popular tumult, mobs have risen and plundered the Jews; but where is the nation, or the religion, which has made a law that it is lawful to keep the lost property of a Jew? Judaism, and Judaism alone, is guilty of this injustice. Prejudice has unjustly assailed the character of the Jewish people, but what sect or party of Christians ever thought of branding them as liars, whose evidence is not to be received; as rogues, unworthy to be appointed as guardians to orphans or property; as murderers, with whom it is unsafe to walk by the road-side? ”

“ There are fourteen millions of Jews in the world. They belong to a race which for at least 1900 years has been subjected to proscription, pillage, massacre, and the torments of endless derision—a race that has endured persecution, which for the variety of torture, physical, material and mental, inflicted on its victims, for the virulence and malignity with which it has been sustained, for the length of time it has lasted, and more than all for the fortitude and patience with which it has been suffered, is without parallel in the history of any other people. ”

“ But when these principles are themselves adulterated, and a system of guileful evasion taught as the religion of Moses and the prophets, what are the results to be expected? The cruel oppression of the poor is bad enough. The enslaving the consciences of the weak is worse; but the corrupting the minds of the simple by such pernicious doctrines, is the worst of all. Yet this is the work of the Jewish religion, as taught in the oral law, and as recognized in the prayers of the synagogue. ”

“ In the eyes of the anti-Semite it is not only a question whether Jews, like other men, are sinners, or are greater sinners than others, but the Jew himself, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, his very existence is an un- pardonable crime. ”

“ Christians—misguided Christians, one must say—who see God’s alleged will of universal Jewish dominion fulfilled by means of the Jews’ defiance and despite of the Law given to Moses, ought to re-examine their ground for so strange and immoral a conclusion. The break-up of this civilization, this age of civilization, will occur because of the collapse of this system by which the Jew has obtained his hold on the nations. The system that gives him his hold is doomed, is passing, and the fallacy of Jewish tribal destiny to rule the world will pass with it. ”

“ We are sure that many Jews of the present day will revolt with horror from such a doctrine; and acknowledge that it is a libel upon religion. They will be ready to confess, that the poor slave is a fellow-creature, and an expectant of life eternal; but let such persons stop to consider whence they have derived these sentiments, so much more just, more merciful, and more worthy of religion, than those expressed in the oral law. That they have not derived them from Judaism is clear. May they not, then, be indebted for them to the influence and atmosphere of Christianity in which they live? ”

“ The persecution and maltreatment of human beings on account of their race or their religious belief is always an offense not only unjust to the victim, but also degrading to the offender. But the persecution and maltreatment of the Jews as mankind has witnessed it, and is now witnessing it in several countries, has been not only especially barbarous in the ferocity of its excesses, but in a singular degree self-debasing and cowardly in the invention of the reasons adduced for its justification. ”

“ They are a sadly degraded race, full of bigotry and superstition, but retaining their activity, cunning, and love for each other, together with an extraordinary firmness in their belief—for which, indeed, these persecuted people have been always famed in every clime.
The Jew of Morocco, next to the Negro in the West Indies and America, is the most persecuted and degraded of God’s creatures. In Tangier and the seaport towns, through the Christian Representatives, the Jews have ever received a certain indirect countenance and support, but in the interior their fate is a very hard one. ”

“ The Jews frighten you as if you were little children, and you do not see it. Many wicked slaves show frightening and ridiculous masks to youngsters—­the masks are not frightening by their nature, but they seem so to the children's simple minds­—and in this way they stir up many a laugh. This is the way the Jews frighten the simpler-­minded Christians with the bugbears and hobgoblins of their shrines. ”

“ As surely, then, as Moses wrote by divine inspiration, did God himself sanction among the Jews, the tolerance of slavery, including the buying and selling of human beings, with their descendants, into perpetual bondage. What God sanctions cannot be in itself, and essentially, evil. ”

“ Nay more, Judaism must be acknowledged as a religion most unfit to promote the happiness of the human race. If Judaism should prevail again, and, as its advocates expect, prevail universally, slavery would also prevail in the same degree: slaves would again be compelled to become proselytes, and again be treated as beasts. Such is the great consummation, the regeneration that Judaism promises the world. We therefore ask every Jewish reader, Whether he can pray for such a state of things, and whether he wishes to be thus enabled to degrade and trample upon his fellow-sinners? ”

“ To eat any ether than rabbinical food would at once cut them off from the bounty of the synagogue, and from the sympathy of its worshippers. To express their convictions would be sufficient to have them numbered with the profane and ungodly, and therefore they conceal their real sentiments, and pretend to be what they are not, that they may not deprive their families of the little assistance which an apparent conformity to rabbinic usages may procure. Here then is another and more unequivocal badge of slavery. The oral law deprives the poor entirely of liberty of conscience. ”

“ The Muslim would have swept through the Mellah with the fierceness of a desert storm. They would have killed a thousand men. They would have enslaved a thousand women. They would have defiled the synagogues. Mine own people, the people I love, would have paid for the deed of my arm. They would have paid a high price in suffering, in tears, and in blood.” He smiled grimly. “I took the blow. I accepted the insult. I bowed to the ground and wiped my face. I am a coward.” ”

“ Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people!” No: they would retire in horror, thanking God that they are not Jews, and that God has preserved them from so dreadful a delusion, and from such iniquitous cruelty. What, then, do our Jewish readers think of this law, and the religion of which it is a part? It is certain that there are multitudes of Jews in this city who live in the constant violation of this command; who constantly use milk supplied by Gentiles, and yet pretend to profess Judaism as their religion. ”

“ It leaves as black as ever the guilt of every fierce retaliation upon Jews by so-called Christians, of every slanderous belief about Jewish creed or life, of every unjust anti-Jewish law ever passed by Christian king or senate. ”

“ And if such slaves as have been converted to the Jewish religion should desire to remain in that perfidious belief, and and should refuse to return to the true faith, they shall be scourged, and scalped, in the presence of the assembled people, and delivered up to whomever we may select, to remain in perpetual servitude. Where the unlawful marital unions hereinbefore mentioned have already taken place, we hereby decree that the infidel party to the same shall have a right to embrace the true faith, should he or she desire to do so. ”

“ Certain it is, that the New Testament contains very different principles, respecting the treatment of slaves, from those which we have discovered in the oral law. But, further, would it not be well for those who disapprove these rabbinic principles, to ask themselves why they profess the rabbinic religion? If it be true that a slave is something better than an ox or an ass, Judaism, which classes them altogether, must be false: and the men who made such laws, must be confessed to be very unfit teachers of religion. ”

“ If a revelation is of any importance, it is to eradicate prejudice. They tell us now that the Jews were so ignorant, so bad, that God was compelled to justify their crimes, in order to have any influence with them. They say that if he had declared slavery and polygamy to be crimes, the Jews would have refused to receive the Ten Commandments. They tell us that God did the best he could; that his real intention was to lead them along slowly, so that in a few hundred years they would be induced to admit that larceny and murder and polygamy and slavery were not virtues. ”

“ Truly, to their unhappy conception, Molokai is but the valley of the shadows, wherein shines never a ray of light to brighten the path of him who must tread its sombre way.
Much of this sentiment is due to demagogues, who stir the people constantly with their recital of the lepers' wrongs. Indignation often runs high when some particularly outrageous abuse is instanced. The natives are almost inconceivably credulous, and, unfortunately, they will not take the trouble to test the truth of demagogic assertion. ”

“ These slaves are for the most part heathens, and this is the chief reason why they, and the tribes allied to them, are rather harshly treated. If, in the course of time, they adopt the faith of Islam, they are at least treated more like one of the family, although not liberated. The fate of these unfortunate beings is, on the whole, dreadful; for deprived of the greatest blessing, their liberty, they are forced to perform hard labour, and indeed in fetters, in which they are bound to prevent them from running away to their native hills, frequently in sight of their place of captivity. ”

“ Truly, they have committed an act at which Islam is revolted, as well as all Moslems and all the peoples of the earth, be they Moslems, Christians, Jews, or idolators. As God lives, it is a shameful deed, the like of which has not been done by any people counting themselves as civilised. ”

“ We tell the Jews, even on the admissions of the Talmud itself, that their present religion is not even the object of their choice, and much less the religion given by God, but that it was imposed upon the consciences of their fathers by force; and, therefore, ask the Jews, Whether they still wish to continue slaves to superstition and cruelty, when God has, in his providence, arranged the means of their delivery? The Jewish people have often had reason to complain of the injustice, contempt, and cruelty of the nations amongst whom they have been scattered ”

“ From Senegal to Lagos, over two thousand miles, there is scarcely an important town on the seaboard where there is not at least one mosque, and active representatives of Islam often side by side with the Christian teachers. And as soon as a pagan, however obscure or degraded, embraces the Moslem faith, he is at once admitted as an equal to their society. Slavery and slave-trade are laudable institutions, provided the slaves are Kafirs. The slave who embraces Islamism is free, and no office is closed against him on account of servile blood. ”

“ Again, men who consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their own agreement with the theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely a transformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying "civilisation" as a transformed tribal existence of which some lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the native Australians. ”

“ Therefore, if any slave belonging to a Jew should desire to be free from servitude, and seek the favor of Christ, no one shall retain him in bondage; no one shall oppose him in any way, or place any obstacle in his path; but, as soon as he shows himself to be a Christian, by his profession and his oath, and shall openly abandon, or reject the false doctrines of his master, he shall be at once released from slavery; and, removed, with all his property, from the control of his master, he shall fully enjoy the blessings of freedom ”

“ Is it not altogether more reasonable to say that the Jewish people, being in slavery, accounted for the misfortunes and calamities, suffered by the Egyptians, by saying that they were the judgments of God? ”

“ The first statement, however, is perfectly true; the Jews were barbarous, and slavery among them was inevitable. But that is speaking humanly. What is the use of God's interference if he does not make people wiser and better? Why did he lay down slavery laws without hinting that they were provisional? Why did he so express himself as to enable Christian divines and whole Churches to justify slavery from the Bible long after it had died out of the internal polity of civilised states? ”

“ Its agitation generally, coinciding with the revival of interest in Jewish history, has helped to transfer Jewish solidarity from a religious to a racial basis. The bond of a common race, vitalized by a new pride in Hebrew history and spurred on to resistance by the insults of the anti-Semites, has given a new spirit and a new source of strength to Judaism at a moment when the approximation of ethical systems and the revolt against dogma were sapping its essentially religious foundations. ”